Saturday, April 24th, 2010

“You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest — we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True,” Republican National Chairman Michael Steele told 200 DePaul University students Tuesday night.

Steele — a former Maryland lieutenant governor and seminarian serving as the first African-American head of the Republican Party — offered a frank assessment of the American political system.

It’s not a “frank” assessment, it’s a monumentally clueless one that assumes people need to be courted by political parties — as if the only issue for black voters is whether a party sucks up to them sufficiently. [emphasis Patterico’s]

There’s actually a lot of disagreement about this. Steele has his defenders; there are those who say this is an example of “gotcha” journalism, that one comment might very well have been taken out of context, you shouldn’t pass judgment until you RTWT (read the whole thing).

That argument just doesn’t hold up. For one thing, how do you take such a comment out of context? In what context does it make sense? Hold it, go off and read what Larry Elder said about the same subject, then come back and reply.

I’ll be happy to wait.

For another thing, if you do go read the article, which is about as much of a “The Whole Thing” as we can get hold of…you see there really isn’t any specific issue nailed down with regard to the GOP, any specific indication of what they’ve done or haven’t done. “We had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” This means what, exactly? Yeah, yeah, we’re all supposed to “get” something. But if Steele doesn’t specify what was done versus what he thought should have been done, then Patterico’s got the right idea.

Most of the Republicans I know, would sooner shove pencils in their eye sockets than vote democrat because they’re worried sick that their kids will be the first generation in recent history to live at a lifestyle less comfortable than their parents’…or that the kids will never be able to earn or keep anything. Tell me, please — what skin color is that?

There are only two possible interpretations of Steele’s comment. One, he thinks the message of the GOP ought to be that it can appeal to something color-aware, it can do as good a job at this as those other guys, and there are no other issues that really matter. Or two, that the message should be one of fiscal restraint and personal freedom…but blacks aren’t responding to that message. And this would be the fault of the people forming the message and packaging it.

I find both of these indefensible. And the second of those two doesn’t really even make any sense.

The message isn’t sufficiently complicated to require color-specific marketing. The party of dissent should never labor under such a problem; the two positions are too far apart. The message from the folks currently running everything, whose agenda will be put to a referendum, is also simple: Put the “Age of Aquarius” kids in charge of government, and then have government make all of the decisions.

Minorities have to be lured into resisting that? They have to have an “outreach” program before they can see what’s wrong with that? I don’t think so, Mr. Steele. I really don’t think so.

Maybe Steele needs to do some serious study of U.S. history with particular attention to the post-Civil War period. Every black politician then was Republican and Republicans enacted major civil rights legislation, but then what happened?

Oh that’s right, the Democrats formed the KKK and hounded, lynched, and killed Republicans, black and white, out of office. And when they took back congressional majorities, what did they do? They repealed every single civil rights law the Republicans had passed. Every single one. Then they implemented Jim Crow and, when that failed, the Great Society.